Narrow-gauge trains outperformed stagecoaches By Jesse Chaney (Contact) Wednesday, February 25, 2009 Richard Albi Fort Morgan Museum Director Marne Jurgemeyer, left, leads a presentation about local railroad history during Saturday’s Smoke Across The Prairie program. Though they averaged only 15 miles per hour, narrow-gauge trains were the fastest way to travel from Denver to Leadville in the late 1800s and early 1900s. So said Richard Albi, a former director of the Colorado Railroad Museum, during the Fort Morgan Museum’s seventh annual Smoke Across the Prairie: Railroad Days program on Saturday. Albi has been featured on several PBS programs about railroads. During his photographic tour of the train ride from Denver to Leadville, Albi said the narrow-gauge passenger trains typically left Denver at 8 a.m. and arrived in Leadville at 6 p.m. The 10-hour trip was only about 151 miles long, he said. “In the 1880s it was a huge improvement over riding the stagecoach,” he said, adding that the rail line survived into the 1930s. Albi said the railroad fare to travel from Denver to Leadville cost about $9.44 in the 1930s. That doesn’t sound like much now, he said, but it is comparable to about $94 today. “It wasn’t a cheap journey,” he said. “...During the middle of the Depression, money was hard to come by.” From the 1880s to the turn of the century, Albi said, the narrow-gauge train line was often used to take people into the mountains for fishing trips and weekend holidays. There was no highway access to the area during that time, he said. Since people in those days usually dressed up whenever they went out in public, Albi said, the passengers on the narrow-gauge trains typically looked their best. During the long trips to and from Leadville, he said, the passengers would use a dry-hopper toilet. The toilets did not use any type of modern plumbing, he said. “When you went in there and looked in, you could see the ties and the railroad bed zipping along beneath you,” he said. Dirt and debris would get sucked into the toilets whenever there was a sudden change in air pressure, Albi said, so it was a bad idea to use them when the trains traveled over trestles. People didn’t typically participate in winter sports at that time, Albi said, so most mountain trips were made during the summer months. However, he said the trains sometimes made the journey from Denver to Leadville during the winter, which proved troublesome and even hazardous for some railroad travelers. Albi displayed a photo of a freight train that rolled off the track after hitting a stretch of ice along the railroad to Leadville. Instead of trying to move the train in the hazardous winter conditions, he said, railroad crews built a temporary track around the wreckage. “They pretty much left this there throughout the winter until the next spring,” he said. Winter railroad travelers also had to cope with excessive snow buildup on the tracks, Albi said. Although canyon walls and trees protected some stretches of the railroad from snow, “once they got up above timberline, it was just like being in the arctic.” Train engineers could dig their way through some snow drifts with rotary snowplows, Albi said. The steam-powered plows, which were pushed by one or more locomotives, had 12-foot blades that would cut through the snow and throw it off either side of the track. Albi said the rotary plows couldn’t cut through all snow buildup, however, and the job sometimes had to be done by hand. He displayed a picture of a crew with shovels digging through a snow bank that was taller than the train itself. “It was quite an adventure riding one of these trains up in the mountains,” he said. The last narrow-gauge train from Denver to Leadville ran in April 1937, Albi said, and the track was removed the next summer. — Contact Jesse Chaney at farm@fmtimes.com.
